Where the Blue-Collar Jobs Will Be

The United States has seen a steady erosion of blue-collar work over
the past several decades. We define blue-collar, working class jobs as
those which primarily make use of physical skill or manual labor. These
occupations include not only factory work or production occupations, but
jobs in construction, materials moving, transportation, installation,
and repair. Blue-collar, working class jobs currently account for 23
percent of all U.S. employment. Blue-collar occupations and the regions
that specialize in this kind of work have seen the highest levels of
unemployment and the greatest vulnerability to the economic crisis. The
decline of high-paying, blue-collar jobs for lower-skilled workers has
caused considerable concern that the U.S. is losing an important source
of good, family-supporting jobs, and that the American labor market is
becoming more uneven and increasingly split between higher-paying
knowledge work and lower-paying routine service work. But what will the
geography of blue-collar work look like in the future?

The map above shows the metros with the biggest projected gains in
blue-collar work. Not surprisingly, the biggest metros top this list.
The biggest gainer is Greater New York which is projected to gain 41,084
working-class jobs followed by Houston (32,249), Chicago (30,482), Los
Angeles (28,811), Phoenix (23,957), Atlanta (22,754), Washington, D.C.
(21,387), Dallas (19,315), Riverside (16,755), and Las Vegas (14,781).

The next map shows the regions that are projected to have the highest
share of their workforce doing blue-collar work out to 2018. Elkhart,
IN, tops the list with nearly half (48.5 percent) of its workforce in
blue-collar jobs - though that is down from 51.3 percent in 2008. It is
followed by Dalton, GA (45.9 percent), Morristown, TN (40.9 percent),
Houma, LA (40 percent), Decatur, AL (37.6 percent), Fort Smith, AR (36.5
percent), Hickory, NC (35.8 percent), Odessa, TX (35.4 percent),
Gainesville, GA (35.3 percent), and Sheboygan, WI (34.3 percent).

The good news is that the U.S. will continue to create relatively
high-paying working class jobs. These jobs will continue to provide good
livelihoods for the workers fortunate enough to have them. The bad news
is that their rate of growth will be sluggish and not nearly enough to
provide the amount of good, family-supporting jobs required to undergird
a middle class of lower-skilled workers. The harsh reality is that
blue-collar, working class jobs in the U.S. are increasing slowly, and
they will grow the slowest in traditional manufacturing and industrial
regions and communities whose economic and social life has revolved
around these jobs. There is little policy-makers can do - aside from
declaring a trade war - to bring back large numbers of these high-paying
jobs. But they can develop strategies to improve not just the wages but
the content of blue-collar work, by engaging workers more fully and
seeing them as a source of innovation. And they can help to infuse more
creativity and design into manufacturing products, helping to broaden
their market and counteract the trend toward declining prices. And
policy-makers will have to develop strategies for improving wages and
the content of work in other faster-growing segments of the economy, a
point I will get to in my next post, which will cover the projected
growth of service jobs.

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Richard Florida is a co-founder and editor at large of CityLab and a senior editor at The Atlantic. He is a university professor in the University of Toronto’s School of Cities and Rotman School of Management, and a distinguished fellow at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate.